Re: Discontinuing student email service

[Matthew Gracie <graciem () CANISIUS EDU>]

Gregg, Christopher S. wrote:
> Along those lines, what are the schools that have outsourced student
> e-mail doing for the following scenarios:
>
> - Students who are student employees where they need "work" e-mail -
> Faculty and staff who also take classes and then have a need for a
> "student" account
>
> Are you creating multiple mailboxes for these people; a student
> account in the outsource location, and "work" account on the locally
> hosted system?  Are you just creating one account and if so which way
> are you leaning?
>
> We're considering an outsourced solution and this is one the
> challenges we're talking through right now.  Obviously if you move
> everyone to an outsourced model this is not an issue, but we're not
> likely to move fac/staff at this time and we'd like to keep e-mail
> related to those functions here.  Right now everyone gets a locally
> hosted Exchange account which is slick for automation and
> integration, but can be messy when a person ends one role but not all
> roles with the university.

We've outsourced our student email to Google, and are transitioning to
Exchange for our faculty and staff. Currently, staff and faculty who are
also part-time or full-time students retain their Exchange accounts. I
would imagine that if someone goes from being an employee of the college
to solely a student, they would move to the Google environment, but it
hasn't really come up.

The bigger problem that we have is faculty want to use Google Docs and
some of the other tools that come with Apps for Education, and we don't
provide them with a school-sponsored account. So they have to make their
own Google accounts, and share them with the students, and so on -- it's
just a bit more messy.

> Thanks,
>
> Chris
>
>
> Chris Gregg Director of Information Technology Information Resources
> and Technologies University of St. Thomas St. Paul, Minnesota
> csgregg () stthomas edu
>
> -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent
> Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of
> Jason Testart Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 9:03 AM To:
> SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Discontinuing
> student email service
>
> Matthew Gracie wrote:
> > Hall, Rand wrote:
> >
> > > On the heels of another student email outsourcing question...it
> > > has occurred to me that some of us may want to step back and
> > > reflect on the following question:
> > >
> > > Why do we still provide student email accounts?
> > >
> > > We once provided labs full of typewriters and then computers. We
> > > used to provide our own dialup service. Once these things were
> > > commoditized we were able to largely eliminate them. Do student
> > > email accounts fall into the same lifecycle pattern?
> > I can't speak for anyone else, but here at Canisius, the
> > college-provided email address is an official point of contact for
> >  departments like the library, the registrar's office, and the
> > bursar's office. It's used in our CMS, our class-specific email
> > lists, and a dozen other places.
> >
> > Getting rid of it would mean either lots more postal mail or coming
> > up with some backend database of student's voluntarily provided
> > home email addresses. I shudder at the thought of maintaining that
> > mess.
>
> We've been maintaining "that mess" for a decade or more now.  The
> email addresses are managed by our identity management system, which
> pushes the addresseses to an LDAP server.  The MX server cluster for
> our domain forwards appropriately based on LDAP.  We expect
> "userid () uwaterloo ca" to work, be it an on-campus or off-campus email
> server.
>
> In addition to the reasons above, we like to think that forcing
> students to have a university email address prepares them for the
> real world where one has a "work email" and a "personal email".  Of
> course, the line between "work" and "personal" is getting fuzzy these
> days.
>
> jt


--
Matt Gracie                         (716) 888-8378
Information Security Administrator  graciem () canisius edu
Canisius College ITS                Buffalo, NY
http://www2.canisius.edu/~graciem/graciem_public_key.gpg